In his work Anthropocene Poetics (2019), David Farrier reflects on poetry’s place in an age of environmental disruption. In it he examines how literary forms, and poetry in particular, can help readers think about hugely different scales of time and space. He argues that poetry functions as a self-reflexive model for thinking and feeling deep pasts and futures – it can deepen our sense of temporality, revealing our entanglement in space with other bodies and objects. Farrier thus focuses on poetry as a mode of contemplation which is particularly apt to evoke the kind of sensitivity needed to understand the Anthropocene. His aim in his study is to assert the need for an Anthropocenic literary imagination. In the Introduction to his work, Farrier argues that “the environmental crisis is also a crisis of meaning”. In this commentary, I wish to unpack some of the ideas introduced in Farrier’s work. In particular, I wish to explore Farrier’s assumptions with an emphasis on how poetry, and the language of poetry, can help us shape the relationship between the human and the non-human and make us think about the way we relate to timescales and other planes of being. I also want to explore the way a poetry of the Anthropocene can deeply influence ideas on language, literary criticism and the ethics of reading and writing.
The Space of the Poem
In the Introduction to his work, Farrier asserts that there are similarities between “rhetorical manifestations of the Anthropocene and the kind of work [a poem does]”. Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker have defined “thick time” as a “transcorporeal stretching of past, present and future” in which our familiarity with deep time is recovered in the uncanny temporalities of an uneven and multivalent present; one could argue that this is the kind of temporality that a reader experiences when entering the space of a poem. Jonathan Culler has observed that “the oddity of lyric enunciation … is that it presents us with a moment that is to be read and reread, thick with multiple times”. What Culler refers to in this quotation is the special ‘now’ of the lyric poem, a moving, iterable now. Thus, poetry can insert us into an Anthropocenic perspective by creating a thickening of the present as a point of confluence between deep pasts and deep futures, and infinite now. Poetry is a mode of contemplation that perfectly conveys liminality, and places the reader in a border-country, a locus of transformation where we constantly feel ourselves becoming alongside otherness, as poems speak of the Earth itself as a work in progress.
The multi-dimensional aspect of time can be grasped by a literary imagination: in his short-story “The Aleph”, Jorge Luis Borges describes a poet who wants to write a poem of the whole Earth without leaving his basement. Thanks to the Aleph, a point in space which contains all other dimensions in time, he is able to write of pasts, presents and futures of people from the whole world without leaving his home. Poetry and the literary imagination, like the Aleph, allow a derangement in space and time-scales – this poetic sensibility is what readers of the Anthropocene need. Farrier writes of “the capacity of the lyric poem to express [a] peculiar thickening of times, framing an Anthropocene poetics in which multiple other times – both distant and available – flow through the ‘now’ of the poem”. When experiencing poetry we are “Here”, meaning both here on Earth and here in the Space of the Poem, but also there, elsewhere.
Farrier argues that poetry allows us to compress vast concepts into distillations of meaning, and to find surprising links between apparently disconnected objects. The language of poetry is a living language, undergoing constant transformation – the act of reading poetry itself is a dynamic performance. The word ‘poetry’ itself derives from the Greek term ‘poiesis’, meaning ‘the act of making’. Farrier intriguingly quotes Rueckert’s assertion that a poem is “the verbal equivalent of fossil fuel” - a poem contains deep quantities of stored meaning, entangled like thick vegetation, meaning which is uncovered slowly and which intersects with other time levels. A poem is stored energy, yet, unlike fossil fuels, it is a renewable energy, capable of changing and adapting to new forms, stretch the limits of meaning, representation and perspective thanks to the power of language and the imagination.
Clinamen: A Swerve Between Contexts
A poetry of the Anthropocene can make us reflect on the nature of literary criticism – it can help us think about texts as living beings performing meaning and about language as a pattern of symbols that travel between entities as they are being written and rewritten, in a constant exchange between porous human and non-human spheres. Here emerges the concept of entanglement – the idea that different life forms and time-spans are inseparable, and that, as Donna Haraway puts it, we are “knotted beings”, our world and experience a result of densely woven relationships between other planes of being, from the microscopic to the gigantic. Above is the image of an artwork which Farrier analyzes in his study – it is Cèleste Boursier-Mougenot’s “Clinamen”, created by the sound artist by suspending more than one hundred white porcelain bowls in a pool of blue water. Farrier writes of the artwork that “The water was heated to achieve the greatest possible acoustic resonance; colliding with one another as they bobbed about, the bowls created a chiming soundscape. The title of the work, Clinamen, means “to swerve”, […] invoking the clustering motion of individual atoms. The installation was meant to imitate the swirl of celestial formations or atoms’ erratic swoop. But it also suggests other, more creaturely images. The gently undulating bowls resemble a jellyfish bloom or else an enormous petri dish teeming with microbial life.” This artwork is a proof of the interconnection between different life-forms, all working with one another to create what resembles a celestial sound.
Farrier borrows the title and density of meaning of this artwork to reflect on the mechanics of poetry, and argues that a poem allows us to make kin with one another “relinquishing the illusion of the separate, bounded self for the startling reality of the self in community” in what is a clinamen, a swerve between contexts. What I found intriguing in Farrier’s work is that he takes the concept of clinamen one step further by affirming that clinamen stands for a range of literary figures: he writes that “tropes such as metaphor (in which an object is torqued into a new set of relations by the interplay of similarity and difference), apostrophe (whereby the speaker turns away to address another), or citation (which situates a poem in a chain of contiguous relations, some of which swerve away from their original contexts) – these forms of clinamen can provide frameworks for thinking about an intentional turn toward the nonhuman life that is also a turn back to the (newly strange) self”. Linguistic formulations mimic the imbrication between and performativity of different lifeforms and prove that we are already entangled with others, even before we turn to consider them. The way metaphors often work is by joining abstract and physical, mental and material. Metaphor is a form of clinamen, a swerve in thought that produces a new ‘knot’ or cluster of understanding – a resolution of some form – without losing a sense of difference. Metaphors are expressions of the malleability of language and perception, figures that draw entities into congregations of difference and relation.
Farrier interestingly quotes Erich Auerbach, who traces ‘figures’ as in ‘figures of speech’ to the Latin word figura, meaning ‘plastic form’. Here arise reflections on the malleability and plasticity of language. In his poem “Difference”, Mark Doty describes a jellyfish and compares it to various objects – this act of comparing constantly changes the way we see the jellyfish — the poem itself becomes jellyfish-like, words shape-shifting in every direction, transitioning from meaning to meaning without reaching a final form. Quoting Doty’s poem, he writes of the jellyfish that it is
“nothing but something
forming itself into figures
then refiguring”
This could allude to both the shape-shifting relations between humans and the environment, which are ever-changing, and to the words of the poem, language itself. As Farrier rightly asserts, poems and jellyfish show that “life progresses when it turns, swerving into the path of other life”.
An Anthropocenic Ethics of Reading?
I also want to briefly comment on the importance of Farrier’s work in relation to the field of semiotics and theories of meaning-making activities. In Anthropocene Poetics Farrier quotes Eduardo Kohn’s assertion that “forests can think”. Nature and the non-human can be viewed as a system of signs, having its own language and undergoing its own semiotic process. The relationship between the human and the non-human can make us think about processes of signification and subject/object dichotomies. According to Kohn, all life is a semiotic process, characterized by different and ever-changing patterns of meaning. All life-forms are continuously engaged in appearing to one another in a process of sign making. Thinking is therefore not limited to the human, and sign-making is not an exclusively human practice. As Farrier writes [quote] “all life forms read and respond to the habits encoded within the environments they live in”.
In his study, Farrier explores Karen Barad's ideas on what she calls diffraction. Barad has argued that diffraction – the effect of differences in phase and amplitude between overlapping waves – is a way to trace the patterns of entangled phenomena. Whereas reflection represents a merely solipsistic form of knowledge, diffraction patterns enable a mapping of differences. The concept of diffraction is an invitation to think against binary logic and towards an idea of knowledge as becoming; as Barad writes diffraction [quote] “is a matter of differential entanglements, where entanglement is not the intertwining of separate entities, but their very inseparability”. Diffraction shows that being, knowing and doing are enmeshed and performed acts. Barad highlights the importance of the body as performance rather than a static thing. She challenges the idea of dichotomies with what she calls intra-actions. She writes that “objects are not static things, but dynamic processes that change in their interaction and intra-action with other objects. Dynamics is not what happens between things, but how these things become what they are”. One could then argue that “knowing is [...] a practice of intra- acting with the world as part of the world in its dynamic material configuring, its ongoing articulation.” Barad’s theory, alongside Farrier’s work, invite reflections on the possibility of a new ethics of reading and writing, where different texts interact with each other and meaning constantly changes in a porous (intra)relationship between readers and writers, subject and object, the human and the non-human. ♦
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